MUSIC

The Raconteurs are the four-piece group formed by Jack White (of the White Stripes), Detroit singer-songwriter Brendan Benson (of three acclaimed solo albums), and Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler (of the Cincinnati group the Greenhornes). What—they would emphatically like you to know—they are not is…well, they'll soon tell you.

"What I'd like," says Benson, "is for people not to think, 'That's Jack White's project…side project,' or something like that."

" 'Supergroup,' " mutters White derisively.

" 'Indie supergroup,' " echoes Keeler. "What the fuck is that It's a band, you know"

Fair wishes. But people will assume. And people will misunderstand. And these Raconteurs are learning that whether you explain or persuade or cajole till you're exhausted, or whether you just ignore it all and hope that your actions will prove everything in due course, you're still no more than a moment away from someone—a British newspaper critic, for instance—dismissing you in one tart, smart-ass phrase. "Jack White's Tin Machine" will do perfectly.

"You know, I actually liked Tin Machine," White will say of the commonly derided group David Bowie founded in the late '80s, choosing to blunt the insult by embracing it, "because I love the Sales brothers. They're just a great rhythm section." Beyond that, if you want to prosper as a Raconteur in the face of those who will marginalize your truest endeavors, then maybe all you can do is find your own ways of explaining what it is that you and your friends have created. "I couldn't imagine it being any better," White says. "I was hoping it would be a huge car crash between four people and that we would take all the pieces and make a sculpture out of it. And we did just that."

"We had no clothes on," Jack White states, when I ask exactly what he and Brendan Benson were doing on the day, two years ago, that he visited Benson at home and the Raconteurs began. "We were roasting potatoes at the fireplace."

In fact, Benson played White a song he had been working on. The music was mostly worked out, but he was stuck on the lyrics. All he had were the first two lines—Find yourself a girl and settle down / Live a simple life in a quiet town—and a chorus in which he simply sang Find yourself a girl over and over. White stepped in. "I just mumbled some nonsense, and then I said the phrase steady as she goes," he remembers. "I liked steady as she goes because I was trying to do something maybe Brendan would do, because Brendan kind of has a love for clichés and finding the beauty in cliché phrases, and I'm always afraid of cliché phrases. So I said, I'll try to do something that's a clichéd phrase and try to make it beautiful. And I thought it was dumb for a second, but then I said, no, there's something cool in there, because you can play off the different angles: the irony of that, and the nautical quality, and the straightforward meaning of it." The result—the song "Steady, As She Goes," which would become their first single and a highlight of their album Broken Boy Soldiers—was good enough to convince them that at last they should make that record they'd been talking about for years.

Benson and White first met around 1998. Benson, who was moving back from California after a bitter major-label first-album experience, saw an early White Stripes show at the Gold Dollar club in Detroit.

"I was just oored," Benson recalls. "I made it sort of a point to meet him. I was living in California, and I felt kind of disheartened by, or disenchanted with, the music business. Also, I kind of had my head up my ass a little bit. But when I saw Jack, I thought: 'He has the antidote. This would be good for me. I need to hang with somebody who's fucking passionate and just all heart.' It was pure, and it was unadulterated. Whereas I'd run into so many people that were real cynical and petty about music. I got a little corrupted, you know"

And, I ask, you were looking for something to decorrupt you

"Or save me. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, but that's kind of how I look at it."

Within that Detroit scene, Benson was something of a star. "Of all the musicians we knew, Brendan was the only one who actually had a record deal," White points out, though he allows that he didn't immediately take to Benson's first album, One Mississippi, a record that, like Benson's subsequent albums, would disguise its weirdness beneath elegant melodies and classic pop-song structures. "I listened to it in Meg's car, and I have to be honest, I did not like it. But the third time I listened to it, it became one of my top ten favorite albums." (Asked to account for his dismissal, he replies, "I would say I probably had my head up my ass. We were just so garage-rock-and-blues centered, explosion centered, that anything off of that map I didn't want to think about." But when he listened more, he heard "just amazing, brilliant craftsmanship—songwriting that started to bring me back to my love of Cole Porter and Brian Wilson."

They became firm friends and mutual advocates. At White's suggestion, they sometimes even performed sets of each other's songs. They put a band together, the Bricks, which performed in a bowling alley on White's twenty-fourth birthday. Also on the bill were the Greenhornes, who had been adopted by that Detroit scene since their first show there, in 1998, and had been befriended by both White and Benson. On the Greenhornes' second Detroit trip and many subsequent ones, they stayed at White's house. They didn't quite know what White could do until one night they sat around singing and playing Beatles songs and White picked up a guitar. Soon White was recording and producing Greenhornes singles at his house. "Just having fun," Keeler remembers. "We'd fucking shoot little play guns, and we'd be recording and filming stuff on Super 8, and we'd drink a lot."

Keeler remembers someone telling him: "You should meet this guy Jack, he's going to be big one day." Others had their doubts, at least when it came to the White Stripes. Benson, for instance. "I just thought, Who the fuck's going to get that" he explains. "Who cares about that You know, besides me." At one point, White asked Benson to pass on some songs to his publisher (the future single "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" among them). "I don't think I ever sent it," admits Benson. He also told White he should drop the color-coded clothes. "I said something like, 'Do you think this red-and-white theme is necessary Because I don't.' I thought, if anything, people might just dismiss you as a gimmick."

As the White Stripes' fame blossomed, the future Raconteurs stayed close. They would appear on the same bills, and the White Stripes would sometimes cover Benson's songs. (They released one, "Good to Me.") When Jack needed a rhythm section to play on the album he was recording with Loretta Lynn, it was Lawrence and Keeler he called. For one song, "Little Red Shoes," Benson was also called in to edit—the Raconteurs' first accidental collaboration. Meanwhile, Benson produced the Greenhornes, and Lawrence and Keeler played on his recordings.

Though all the Raconteurs' songs are written by Benson and White, Lawrence and Keeler were brought in not long after they wrote "Steady, As She Goes," and the album was recorded by the four of them in Benson's home studio in Detroit. Band names would bubble up periodically. "Dude, I got it!" one of them would declare, but nothing stuck.

I ask why "Raconteurs" seemed to encapsulate something about who they are.

"Because Jack said it," says Keeler, and they all laugh.

It came from an article about Mike Wallace, who had interviewed White on 60 Minutes about Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose. "I liked him a lot," White says. So he decided to read up on Wallace, stumbling across a biography originally from the Web site of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. In the second paragraph is this: "After service in the Navy, the baritone-voiced radio raconteur landed a string of early television jobs in Chicago."

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